The fuel/bomb pods on the old B-58 Hustler strategic bomber look to be about the same size as SpaceShipOne, the suborbital winner of the X-Prize. Instead of the slow launch plane they use now, if you could find a flying B-58 you could get up to mach 2 before you even lit SpaceShipOne's rocket. Might
even double how high it would go. Richard Branson, who's taken a great interest in the SpaceShipOne program, could probably buy one of these with change he found in the love seat of one of his private jets. (Assuming he lets hundreds of thousand of dollars in spare change fall out of his pocket when he sits down, as all Billionaires should.)

I just remembered that researching an idea I had for the X prize is how I found the bakery.
I think my idea was a large expandible doughnut shaped balloon with a rocket engine at the center.
Funding would have been a minor problem, though.

Actually, this is a great idea. The service ceiling of the B-58 Hustler is over 13,000 feet higher than the White Knight<link>, and with the extra speed, they may be able to milk a bit more altitude out of SpaceShip One. [+]

I was expecting a weight problem with this idea, but it turns out theres 280kg to spare. However, intuitively (though Im not qualified to say), I think theres an aerodynamics problem. Spaceship One would ride *in* the shock wave of the B-58. This is bad, no?

Oh, and keep all doors and windows closed at mach 2  dogs like to stick their head out.

[Laimak] I assume the bomb bay maintains zero airflow over its contents until the bay doors are opened. That is going to be one almighty shock hitting a lightweight structure in a very short time when they open - much shorter than the airframe would suffer if the spacecraft were to accelerate itself to that speed. Maybe I misunderstand aerodynamics, which, on the whole, is probably more than likely.

Bomb doors on a Concorde? (after all, the original idea was for a long-range, supersonic nuclear bomber as a development of the Vulcan) Mind you, Branson tried and failed to resurrect these too. Also, I agree that dropping the little plastic egg that makes up the fuselage of SS1 out into a Mach 2 airstream could rattle the windows a bit...

you could use a b-58 if you climbed at a very steep angle at max throttle. once the air got too thin for you to get much useful thrust, the plane would coast in a arc. the top of the arc would be the slowest point in the plane's travel. if the ascent was steep enough, the top point speed would only be a few hundred mph, very favorable for launching eggs into space...

I think they're breathtaking to look at. I saw a documentary about the B-58 and all the macho, tough-guy pilots said it was the plane's beauty, first and foremost that drew them to want to fly it. One guy said: "It looked like it was going a hundred miles an hour just sitting on the tarmac."

//How on Earth do you get a live bear into an
ejector seat in the first place?//

Very carefully.

Here's the story of the Sea Fury:

"On 23 June, 1942, Luftwaffe Pilot Oberleutnant
Arnim Faber erroneously landed his Focke-Wulf Fw
190A-3 fighter at RAF Pembrey, apparently having
mistaken this airfield for a Luftwaffe channel
coast airfield. The British were thereby presented
with a working example of the Fw 190 fighter,
which had been giving the RAF an extremely
difficult time. The Hawker Fury design was a direct
result of the examination of Faber's Fw 190A-3."

The pilot's story sounds a little suspicious. He
might have "accidentally" landed in a place that
would result in him surviving the war in an English
POW camp as opposed to flying for the Luftwaffe
until victory or death. Germany didn't have a 3rd
retirement plan. Then
again... this was after the Battle of Britain when a
couple of thousand German pilots got killed in a
totally failed campaign. Just sayin'.

The Hawker Tempest Mk.2 (predecessor of the Sea Fury) incorporated some captured FWs' canopy design and radial engine mounting features. The Fury would have gotten that second-hand I suppose. I don't think anything else was on it though.

ok, 'cancelled' wasn't a great word. But it was
tricky to fly, harder to land, was an intensive user
of in flight fuelling... it was pretty much
unrecoverable in the event of a supersonic engine
failure. These factors led to 20% of them
crashing... which is a scary number no matter how
you slice it, and would be a serious worry for a
launch platform.

IT was retired from service pretty quickly, 10 years
is nothing compared to the service lives of the
B52/Vulcan/B1b/F111/B2 .

I may be wrong, but I've read it on various parasitic
launch sites. There is a significant difference
between dropping a tumbling pod (even if it
stabilizes during the fall), and separating a craft in a
state where it can fire its own engines.

Well, I'd have to read your reference but I know that
missiles are launched from supersonic aircraft. The
Space Shuttle also ejects it's boosters at high
supersonic speed. You may have to give the
separating aircraft a kick though.